Thursday, February 12, 2009

I figured the meetings would be a good place to talk about what was happening in ALT.NET world. I had a bunch of stuff that I intended to share with people to get some conversation going last night but I didn't need it. Here it is:

UPDATE 13/02/2009 - Added home for international VAN. Thanks to Richard Banks for the info

ALT.NET is a big topic and there are loads of resources out there for those that interested. Here is a quick sample of a few. Add yours into the comments:

International

http://altdotnet.com/ - The official home of ALT.NET. The site itself is only really a couple of pages that act as a springboard off to other resources.

http://altnetpedia.com/ - The ALT.NET Wiki. This is the best launching pad for learning about ALT.NET. From here you will find definitions, articles, videos, tools, etc.

The ALT.NET Mailing List - A yahoo mailing list where the conversations take place. This list gives you access to many of the brightest guys in the industry and a lot of very interesting conversation. It can get a little heated at times but persevere.

Virtual ALT.NET Meetings (VANs) - These virtual meetings are frequently had over LiveMeeting and are often recorded for viewing them later. I normally find out about them on Twitter but they have a mailing list as well.

ALT.NET Podcast - Started by Mike Moore and now run by James Avery. So far there have been discussions around Ruby, Object Databases, Domain Driven Design, jQuery, and more.

National

http://ozalt.net/ - The home of the Australian ALT.NET community. Acts as an aggregation point for Aussie ALT.NET group activity and maintains several feeds for local community member blogs.

OzVANs? - There has been some discussion around running Australian Virtual ALT.NET Meetings. If anyone is keen, let me know. This could seriously help with the timezone issue

Local

http://perth.ozalt.net/ - This site. Your one stop shop for ALT.NET action in Perth. OK not quite but you will hear about the meetings here.

The meetings themselves - Thus far we have had one. We meet on the second Wednesday of every month at 5:30pm. In case you are from the future reading this I suggesting checking the homepage for details of the next meeting.

Last night we had the very first meeting of the Perth ALT.NET user group. There were just over 15 people there (I didn't actually count but that's the number that people gave me) and quite a few that messaged me to say they couldn't come but they're keen for the next one.

I had planned 2 basic sessions but the amount of conversation around what ALT.NET is and what we want to do was enough to keep us going to last call. I find that very encouraging.

To start with we ran quickly through what it is to be ALT.NET after which everyone agreed that it was a noble goal to aspire to. Here is a link to the original article that coined the phrase if you are interested: http://laribee.com/blog/2007/04/10/altnet/

We then went on a rambling conversation about a whole bunch of topics including:

Being aware of the total cost of ownership for software and ensuring that our clients and our employers are educated about this

Reducing the amount of friction that we get from our toolset (making tools work the way we do not vice versa) and understanding that our clients should be allowed to expect the same

Being passionate and delivering technical excellence and balancing those against pragmatism and providing customer value (The most architecturally perfect framework solves nothing if it doesn't help you client improve their process)

Our responsibility as a community to influence our peers and our vendors. We cannot sit back and just nod when someone else is making sense. Raise your voice and be heard

It was a very "Spiderman" conversation. With great power comes great responsibility. If you were there and I missed anything important drop a comment on this post and I'll update it.

We also talked about a number of different session types for future sessions including:

Thanks to MS-Press Australia I was able to give away a door-prize. A copy of CLR via C# by Jeffrey Richter went to Mitch Wheat. Apologies for those that had to leave early. In future I need to figure out when and how to draw door prizes.

I did have a whole heap of news-like stuff that I had found interesting recently but I never got around to telling anyone about any of it so I'll put it all in it's own post. If you have any news that you think may be of interest to the rest of the group, let me know and I'll add it to the agenda for next time.

Speaking of next time, I have booked the 43 Below function room from 5:30pm on the 11th March. A lot of people seemed very enthusiastic about voting for topics on the night so I think we'll do that. If you have a particular theme that you'd like to talk about please let me know.

Thanks again to everyone that came along and I hope to see you next time.

I figure that the tools topic is something many people will have an opinion about. Also Hanselman's Tools List wasn't updated last year.

Bring a laptop if you want to demo a tool. I'll be bringing a projector and hopefully I can rustle up a projection screen. If not, I encourage you to wear a white top. That way a couple of us can stand side by side and we'll project the image onto our backs.

We don't have sponsors throwing money on us (somewhat purposefully at this stage) so it'll be every person for themselves. Having said that they do have some special platters for those using the function room but we have to book those in advance (this week would be better). If anyone is interested let me know and I'll see what I can organize.